Monday, October 29, 2007

Every time I open my writing notebook to start something else, or to flip through the pages and see what I was thinking I always happen upon this one page that is completely blank except for a line written at the top which reads "Larry the mouth of God." I've spent months pondering over when I wrote it, or even what I was thinking. I can't remember when, but I think I figured out what I was thinking.

Today while at the Reference desk I was working with one of the full time librarians, Larry, who is a man so bizarre and hilarious that no description I give here will ever quite do him justice. He's a larger guy (from years of drinking), he has a big beard and is completely gray, and a laugh that comes easy. He could drink any two guys under the table, his main hobbies are incense making, conspiracy theories, and trying to weird me out. Over the last month he's taken it on himself to fill me with life lessons, including his 45 minute rule (involving stepping out of the house for 45 minutes in order to allow angry female to cool off). He's convinced that one day I'm going to end up as bizarre as he. He always has a slew of the most off the wall questions to bounce off me. Today's question involved a theory that the world is over populated with humans (obvious) and that the carrying capacity is really like 500,000,000 at most. So, he posed the question "If you had to pick the 5 billion to kill, who would you pick?"

Then it dawned on me while I was walking to the Red Line to come home that it was that Larry I was thinking of when that line mysteriously jumped from my brain to the page. The idea came back in full force. Here is a guy who is a couch potato. A weird solitary dude who sits at home and drinks profuse amounts of beer, and what he spouts is absolute truths, but no one believes him. Larry the mouth of god

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I broke the 15,000 word mark yesterday on "The Long Goodnight" and the story is starting to seem a little more fully realized. I'd realized I've been going backwards with most mysteries, trying to know the exact mystery and then plug a story in around it. This time I've not done any thinking and I'm letting the characters drive the story, and the responses. It's been interesting.

A Slavic diner owner (hmm another diner), named Bogdan, has become quite an interesting and bossy character, and he is immense fun to write. This is what being an author is all about. When it feels like dictation you're putting on page, and the creating is just natural.